Climate Talks End with Small Steps Forward

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When the annual round of global climate talks ended on Sunday
(Dec. 12), no new treaties or pledges to cut greenhouse gas
emissions were on the table. However, negotiators in Durban,
South Africa, did continue chipping away at the intractable
problem of global warming, making small, concrete agreements, as
well as symbolic ones.

While climate negotiations
move forward incrementally, science indicates we risk failing
to keep global warming within the target that was set during
earlier rounds of these talks.

Perhaps the highest profile achievement this year is the Durban
Platform — essentially an agreement to come up with a treaty in
the coming years, according to Nathan Hultman, an assistant
professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public
Policy, who attended the talks.

The Durban Platform calls for the creation of a legally binding
agreement by 2015, and for it to take effect by 2020, with the
intent that nations reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to
limit global warming to either 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit or 3.6
degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius or 2 degrees Celsius) by
2100. It is believed that a cap on warming along these lines will
avert the worst of the sea-level rise, extreme weather, species
extinctions and other changes predicted to come with climate
change. [ How
2 Degrees Will Change Earth ]

A new treaty?

This agreement could become the successor to the original climate
change treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, Hultman said. However, the
document establishing plans for a new treaty doesn't say what
such a treaty might look like or who might participate.

In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol established a legal framework for
tackling climate change and committed developed nations, not
including the United States, which did not sign on, to cutting
their emissions. The first commitment period of the Kyoto
Protocol ends in 2012. Much of the suspense going into Durban
revolved around
this treaty's fate.

Although other developed nations, including Japan, Russia and
Canada, backed away from extending Kyoto, the European Union
agreed to a second commitment period, based on its own
pre-existing region-wide plan to reduce emissions. The EU agreed
to this in order to see the Durban Platform go forward, Hultman
said.

But this is likely the end of the Kyoto Protocol, Hultman added.

"The Kyoto Protocol can fold out gracefully, and some of the more
optimistic of the countries in the world think maybe then we will
have the new agreement that can take its place afterward," he
said.

The details

The talks had more concrete success in sorting out some of the
"more nerdy technical details about climate policy," Hultman
said.

These included hammering out the details for a Green Climate
Fund, which is expected to raise $100 billion a year by 2020 to
help developing nations cope with climate change, according to
Hultman.

Negotiators also agreed to include
carbon capture and sequestration — a technology that prevents
carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere by storing
the gas — as an eligible project under the Clean Development
Mechanism, which came out of the Durban meeting, that encourages
projects to reduce emissions in developing countries. At the
Durban talks negotiators also made progress setting up the means
to ensure countries are keeping their commitments to reduce
emissions, Hultman said.

The gap

Many climate scientists and officials are worried about what the
future may hold if the world continues to warm unabated, and
Durban offered no new pledges to reduce emissions.

To put the world on a trajectory that would keep warming below
the 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) target a reality, global
greenhouse gas emissions — measured in terms of the most
prominent greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide — would need to be no
higher than 48.5 gigatons (44 metric gigatons) of carbon dioxide
equivalent by 2020, according to the report Bridging the Gap
issued in November by the United Nations Environmental Programme.
(For reference, greenhouse gas emissions in 2009 measured 54.5
gigatons, or 49.5 metric gigatons, of carbon dioxide equivalent.)

Assuming all nations' existing pledges are honored, the world
will fall about 6.6 gigatons (6 metric gigatons) short. However,
it is both technologically and economically feasible to fill in
this gap, according to the report.

Richard Rood, a climate scientist who teaches a class on climate
change problem-solving for graduate and undergraduate students at
the University of Michigan, has changed his curriculum to reflect
what he believes is a more realistic outcome: 7.2 degrees F (4
degrees C) by the end of the century.

"Currently, we are accelerating our emissions and the pressure
for economic growth and economic stability I see overwhelming any
desire to reduce emissions for the long-term environmental
purpose," Rood said. "It is my opinion that we are committed to
that warming."

For his class, he now draws upon a series of papers published in
January by the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society A, which explore the possibility and implications of
warming of 7.2 degrees F (4 degrees C) or more.

The combination of underestimates of the rate of increasing
emissions, overly optimistic estimates of when global emissions
would peak, and the slow progress of climate talks suggest that
an increase of this magnitude is more likely than thought, writes
Mark New, of the University of Oxford, in his introduction.

Rood, who also blogs about climate for the weather website,
wunderground.com, has followed the talks in Durban.

"I am of the opinion it is better to continue talking than not,"
he said. "But I think any real action is going to percolate
up from cities to regions to countries. … I think it's good
to have this sort of top-level activity to provide the framework
or environment to think about how to behave, but I am not, at
this point, looking for the U.N. to provide the solution to this
problem. The problem is too engrained across society in the way
we behave and the way we use energy and ultimately, the way we
consume."